


Breathe In

by CurlicueCal



Series: Packstuck AU [6]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: (Nanna Egbert), Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Canonical Character Death, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Mom Lalonde cameo, Mother-Son Relationship, it was supposed to be fluff with some angst but it's probably more angst with some fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-28 14:10:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18758017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CurlicueCal/pseuds/CurlicueCal
Summary: A mother lost; a son gained.---In which James Egbert adopts a baby air elemental.





	Breathe In

**Author's Note:**

> This works as a stand alone and can be read in any order.
> 
> A strange little story I could NOT get out of my head. So I wrote it down. :p  
> A bit in the vein of [WKW/WKW](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1758279/chapters/3759071). What can I say? I have guardian!feels. So much.
> 
> Many thanks to [Skates](https://rollerskatinglizard.tumblr.com/) for beta.

As soon as it’s safe—or perhaps a fair bit before, if you’re honest—you step past the edge of the town’s central ward circle, where any folk who could make it have gathered for shelter. There was almost no warning before the typhoon elemental descended, just the wind whipping up like the precursor to an unexpected storm, and then the blanketing of the sun into darkness as the air fractured into chaos and noise.

Such a short space of time, and yet everything from the past few hours feels equally fractured in your head. The eeriness of midday nightfall. The fires of your forge blowing out in one unearthly gust of air that knocked you from your feet and sent stray embers scattering hungrily across the earthen floor. Every fiber in your body protested leaving such a public danger untended, but you’d had time to do little more than tip your quenching well to spill out in a sloshing tide of water and snatch up your best iron hammer before the violence in the air drove you from your shop. And only that same violence turned you towards the inn’s public green and the wardings there instead of the quiet home you share above your mother’s joke shop at the edge of town. 

Your mother is a very capable woman. She will be well.

Still, you jump the line of carved sigils before the air has quieted, abandoning the ward circle to press out onto the public street while the fading energy of the dispersed elemental still crackles in the air like ozone after a storm. Carts lie overturned, livestock wander skittish and unpenned, buildings sag half destroyed. Those will need re-building. The owners will need help and good service to get back on their feet. You got a fresh stock of iron in this month, with care and a bit of creative bookkeeping you can provide the working of much of it to the cause.

Your mother is a great believer in creative bookkeeping for a worthy cause.

You climb a fallen store façade where it blocks the street—the jumble of wood smashed and splintered unnaturally as if angry hands had torn into it. In a way, they have. A slice of memory-- dark, roiling whips and spirals of air, stained black by mud and wreckage and raw power, lashing out at the town, at its structures, at a single, solitary figure that stood to oppose it in the courtyard of the inn. Another fragment, farther back-- the stone under your knees when you fell, just beyond reach of the ward circle, your neighbors’ hands reaching helplessly towards you. The bruises that still bite sharply with each step keep the memory confusingly close. Closer still, like a too-bright image burned behind your eyelids is—this: Noise and hatred, wind cutting at your skin, stabbing right down to your soul, swallowing your world. A seething, suffocating rage that stole the air from your very lungs on the fringes of safety.

And the woman who swayed past you, stepped from safety into madness, to meet power with power.

An out-of-towner, and therefore a subject of much gossip this past week, but free enough with drink and coin to excuse her eccentricities.

A sorceress, it would appear.

Amazing. 

Making your way over a tricky bit of fallen wall, you search your mind for her name and are abashed to find you can’t recall ever being introduced. A very ungentlemanly state of affairs to have, for the fine lady who saved your life. Saved your life and much of the town as well, for all the haggard state of things does not show it. Letting the typhoon spirit blow itself out against the town’s inner wardings would have meant much greater property damage. Perhaps you should have stayed to introduce yourself? But, no, your mother first.

Your mother who will be well.

The pattern-work of the shop’s personal wards is sturdy and well-maintained. Your mother will laugh at your worry, poking your ribs and teasing you fondly, but this anxious thing the wind blew into your chest will not be still until you see her.

Your step hesitates as you round a corner, chest briefly tightening with the memory of stolen air. A stray wind sprite flickers aimlessly along the street in a winding ribbon, stopping to play with a torn canvas, form gathering into something a bit more corporeal as you watch. It jerks skittishly up in the air as it notices you, turning glowing eyes in a formless cloud on you for just one startled heartbeat before it dissipates, bolting away on a gust of wind. Newborn and already so frightened—the cord around your chest loosens even as your heart clenches in turn and you find you can’t begrudge the little being its progenitor’s attack. 

The typhoon elemental had shed the little wind children like sparks as it lashed at the town and its wardings, struck them free in spiraling eddies on the sorceress’s spells. And the little elementals had been torn apart just as carelessly as they were birthed, wisps of power splintered from the whole and then ground to nothing in the torrential winds of a greater being’s rage. Some got away, you’re hopeful. 

You know elementals to be largely neutral beings, reflecting the natural world around them. Land spirits, the _landvaettir._ Respected and dealt with carefully, they can be benevolent helpers. Their presences empower the same energies they feed from– crops grow bountiful, clouds move in obliging weather patterns, water runs clear and clean. Cityfolk may wonder at the careful dance of courtesies you maintain here in the countryside, but they are happy to reap the bounties of your harvests. 

Will the fey little beings shake this day like a bad memory? Or will it cling to them like a weight, make them grow up cagier even than most of their kindred, curiosity and caprice subsumed into caution, suspicious of this material world that has treated them so poorly?

Will any of them grow turbulent and angry, gathering malevolent energy into their being until they, too, warp the world around them with storms and fury?

As you approach your street you can see the path the typhoon elemental cut into town, the very stones and earth of the street turned up and a trail of destruction in its wake. You don’t know what slight could have set it on your quiet town with such fury, with wild hatred that seared in the air and your lungs. You don’t know how the outer wards failed, to let such a spirit in, but that is a problem to be solved in the future. After you have seen to immediate consequences of the disaster. 

You spare brief words for the neighbors you encounter, checking to see all are well, but unable to bring yourself to stop so close to your destination. They pick hesitantly through the debris outside their doors, keeping their children close to them and looking around with wide, amazed eyes. Distress balanced by strange gratitude, and a practical desire to help where they can. Each one inquires after your mother, offering soft prayer for her well-being. Jane ‘Nanna’ Egbert is a well-loved dispenser of both tricks and sweets, a clever-tongued, eagle-eyed grandmother to all.

Your mother will be impatient to check on the neighborhood children, see they have something nice to chase away the lingering tension that hangs heavy and thick in the air, like a hand on your quiet town. She’ll call you a silly dear and chase you back out to go be of use to someone who needs it.

You reach your home, the neatly kept garden out front as much a wreck as the rest of the street, the picket fence torn up, the window shutters hanging crooked, but the structure solid and still standing. The sign for your mother’s shop lies fallen halfway up the walk. 

The sight strikes you uneasily, reminds you of that pressing, suffocating energy that still lingers in the air.

You press the door open, step into your home with the scent of ozone thick in your nose. 

The front, broad room of the house is your mother’s shop front, all shelves and display cases, cluttered, but neatly ordered according to your mother’s own capricious but exacting standards. The storm’s power has breached this far into the house, knocking books asunder from their shelves and sending glass bowls of candies to break and scatter on the floor, while leaving other areas oddly untouched. 

It is not as bad as your imaginings, and you take one, two steps into the room, light and quick.

You halt.

The air is so thick and cloying in your lungs.

There is blood on the floor.

You are suffocating, again, your lungs refusing to work, which is strange, because the lady sorceress gave you back your air, chased the storm from the streets and the town.

Your mother’s hand is there, curled in a way that looks gentle, and she is still on the floor, there halfway in front of the desk she keeps her till in, where she runs a joke shop at no particular profit because she loves it and she likes to keep busy, and sometimes she hides wind-up alarms under your bed when you tell her she shouldn’t work so hard, and sneaks pies outside your door for you to step in, and you can’t breathe, the air is gone.

It is not as bad as your imaginings. 

It is so much worse.

\---

In the end it isn’t practicality that gets you moving.

You haven’t said a word, you haven’t moved an inch. You are, quite probably, hiding, like your very stillness and denial could prevent the world from moving forward with this new truth.

It isn’t practicality, or acceptance, or even the sheer, physical inevitability of time and biology and the fact that while you might not _feel_ like you are breathing the fact remains that you are.

It’s a flicker of movement, half hidden behind the curve of your mother’s body, and you step forward and rejoin the forward progress of the world before you even remember you don’t want to. 

There’s something just there, tucked shivering against your mother, and your mind says ‘child’ a minute before you realize that isn’t correct. Or, not quite.

It’s a wind sprite, blood-splashed and blue-eyed and looking unusually solid and human in its infant shape. Farther back, previously out of sight behind the desk, there are more of the wind sprites, a half dozen in all, perhaps, forms shifting anxiously where they press themselves back against the far curve of the ward circle that shelters and imprisons them. 

Oh. 

_Oh._

Your heart twists. You want to sob and you want to laugh and you’re smiling with tears blurring your vision because, oh, of course she did. She left her circle to gather in the little air elementals, new-formed and frightened and being torn to pieces by the storm that birthed them.

Your mother has always been very fond of children.

Fond of children, and fearless, and ferocious in her pursuit of the right way.

You think you know the right way now. You can all but hear her in your ear: _Business first, James, my boy! And there’ll be no time for shenanigans later, so we best get up to them during, hoo hoo!_

You’ve still got your apron from the smithy on, an unpardonable oversight in any other circumstance. You fold it neatly and set it far to one side, taking a moment to brush down the rest of your clothes for any stray filings. The _landvaettir_ aren’t as averse to iron as demons, but there’s no call to be inhospitable. 

The wind sprites watch you curiously, swirling restless to the front of the circle, amorphous currents of air that try out wings and curlicues and wispy smoke tails as they go. And an unusual stab at more bipedal forms—you keep seeing surprising glimpses of human-like children, eerily convincing in the heartbeats they attain solidity. One of them actually drops to two feet as you approach, eyes glowing like fireflies as it mimics you with toddling, air-assisted steps. It bends as you bend, siblings dipping in the air to cluster round as well, and you have an attentive, ethereal audience as you unknot the woven cord that provides the structure and power of the warding circle. No carved stone and inlaid metal here like the public circle at the inn, but the patterns are carefully worked, prayer sigils dyed and knotted into the cord itself—and it’s a much more practical option for the average household in an emergency. As the knot parts, the wind sprites flow out around you in a fluttering gust of air, kicking up dust and fine debris in little eddies as they swirl out into the shop. 

A few of them of them drift in close to— to your mother, ruffling her hair with feather-soft tendrils of air, circling with a curious, concerned bewilderment, and poking at their final sibling where it still lingers, the wide-eyed image of a child in the spill of blood on the floor.

Your heart tips unsteadily again; grief threatens to consume you.

This will never do. 

There is work to be done and children of any sort have no business in such a wretched mess. You edge closer on your knees and the wind sprites scatter before you, wary but curious. The remaining elemental points eyes a little too blue in a face a little too human at you, shockingly childlike as it clutches one tiny hand into the cloth at the front of your mother’s shirt.

“Not going to fly away?” you ask it, rhetorically. “Or… can’t you fly right now? Are you hurt?” Blue eyes stare back, round and unblinking. Elementals can pick up human tongue if they trouble themselves, but surely not in the few hours since these little ones splintered into being. Still, it’s nice to speak. Your throat feels disused, hoarse and catching oddly, and you can still halfway feel the burn of air being dragged from your lungs unwilling. Those moments when you knew with terrifying certainty you were going to die, that this being had killed you. That you’d never see your mother in this world again.

Breathe. In. Out.

“It must have been frightening.” You’d seen death, felt it wrap cold claws into your lungs, replace your air with fear, and then a stranger had stepped forward and saved you. And what will you do now, now that you’re alive in this world after everything? 

(Mother, _Mama_ , please, I don’t want to go on by myself. There are monsters out here.)

“But it’s done now. It’s done and you’ve been very brave.” Carefully, ever so carefully, you reach out and touch the upturned face, surprised when it stays solid for the contact. You wipe a smear of blood clean from the round-apple cheek under your thumb. 

“She’d be so proud of you,” you say, and your throat closes around the words. When the little _landvaettir_ still doesn’t move, still sits and watches you with eyes too bright, and doesn’t go incorporeal, doesn’t flutter away to poke around in the shop like its siblings, you tug your sleeve down and set to cleaning away the mess on its face with intention. There will be iron in the blood, you think. Surely no kind of good for a new-made elemental. Your mother would never stand for it. You won’t stand for it. 

“There, now,” you tell the wind child, as it watches you with blue, blue eyes. Blue like your mother’s. “It’s done and you’ve made it through and we’ll set you to rights.”

The child blinks and furrows its face up under a final scrub of your sleeve (you really should apply soap and water to the task, and you’ll need to see to the floor soon before the stain sets— _oh_ ) and, as you draw away to consider the outcome, finally moves. It presses little fists to the floor, round child face squinting further in first bewilderment and then determination. Its hands bump the floor again, and then again, an unhappy noise choking short in distress as the child rocks in place, hitting the floor harder and harder again as if expecting each time that it will make way. 

It feels a little bit like your own hands beating against strange, impassible reality, your own breath caught in your throat, your own sharp, aching fear and pain. You don’t remember moving. You’ve caught those small hands in your own, stopping their furious denial.

“I know, I know. But you can let go now. It’s time to let go.”

And then all at once this child is looking up at you, with eyes like your mother’s, that brim with tears, tumbling forward into your arms, and tipping its head into your chest to _wail_ , a long, toddler howl of noise, hurt and angry and betrayed.

He cries the way you feel. And something inside of you—lets go.

You hold the wind child close, surprised at his solid, unexpected weight in your arms, but infinitely grateful to have someone to cry with.

\---

Your mother’s name was Jane.

You name him John.

\---

Your son is a blessing and a handful. Curious, full of energy, into everything. His elemental siblings have long since departed, wandered away in an hour or a day at the call of their whims, but John remains, solid and unchanging in form, a newborn _landvaettir_ touched by human blood. A bright-eyed toddler with a mop of dark hair and more than a bit of the look of your mother. John babbles noise constantly, picking up simple words already. He likes sweets and hates to be alone. He is easily frustrated, like many a child, caught against the limits of his physicality, but just as easily cheered, and his moments of temper are brief and quickly forgotten. 

He laughs as hard as he cries, and much more often. He is like your mother that way.

Your neighbors are—you have never thought of your neighbors as unkind. And in truth, they are not. But they are uncomfortable with John. They do try, in their way. You hear them murmur amongst themselves, about the need to be understanding of your loss, respect your grief. Giving you allowance and time. They fuss over you; bring you casseroles, pack you off home to bed when they decide you've worked too long. And though they may eye your son uneasily, or knot their shirt laces in quick warding when they visit you in the smithy, they have not, so far, said words to you. A few, mostly those who also lost much (too much) to the elemental’s storm press their lips together and leave the room when you turn up with tools in hand and John on your hip, but the situation, like so much in your town, remains in uneasy transition.

There is much work to do.

The fine lady sorceress is gone when you seek her out, left with the dawn the very morning after the storm, and many more questions than answers behind her. You find yourself in the ungentlemanly position of owing your life and town to someone you cannot even thank. Her name, you determine, by some rather forward nosing around, is Lalonde, though there seems to be a surprising degree of confusion on the subject. You file the fact away nevertheless. You find a familiar strip of fabric while helping clear debris on the main street and take the scarf somewhat sentimentally into your possession. Perhaps one day you can return it to her.

For now you are grateful for your son, and for the indulgence of your neighbors, and for the hard work of rebuilding to keep your hands and mind busy. And there are many things you are not sure you want to think on. As weeks go by after the storm, they seem to bring far more questions than answers. The outer wards of the town were defaced, by accident or malice. Someone hiking out to the east finds the remnants of a _nithing_ pole, and the circle used to bind the elemental, trapping it with its torment until it could be turned loose to blow out its fury and fear on anything and everything in its path. That discovery provokes a flurry of alarmed speculation among your neighbors, and a strange, aching renewal of grief in your chest. You do not want to feel sympathy for the creature that murdered your mother, tore down your town, stole the air from your aching lungs. And yet, when you tuck your son into bed, on those nights when you are not sure you will find sleep yourself, you sit and watch him and think about how you are not the only one who lost.

“Dad,” John calls you for the first time one morning, beaming a toddler smile, and you are so caught in warm, complicated emotions that you don’t notice the frog in your apron pocket until it jumps directly into your mixing bowl. 

You make a noise like _bluh!_

John keels over with laughter. 

A very startled and batter-covered frog eyes you from your breakfast.

Your own laugh catches you by surprise, a burst of breath tumbling free from your chest. The smile stretches your face so that it almost hurts. Your ridiculous, clever, beautiful son goes on giggling, looking tremendously pleased with the success of his prank and miming surprised frog faces at intervals. He remains in good spirits even as you send him outside to release his amphibious friend and set about cleaning up the mess and re-starting the preparation of breakfast.

John makes a go at hefting the bag of flour as he returns—most of it ends up strewn across the floor of the kitchen, solid objects still being something of a puzzle for him, but you don’t comment, and you let him lick the spatula when you are done.

You are so very proud of him.

 

**Author's Note:**

> There's a whole follow up about his future encounters with Mom-londe and how he eventually winds up Rose's custodian as well. Not to mention the chaos that is Rose and John as supernaturally powerful siblings.
> 
>  
> 
> Do they ever meet up with everybody else in this verse? Absolutely. Eventually.  
> Will I ever get any of this out of my head and into text? Probably. Eventually.


End file.
